The “Idle” Ideology: Vapid Bourgeois Romanticism
(Dr. Johnson, the brilliant English essayist whose essay series The Idler inspired the less-than-brilliant anarchist publication of the same name.)
Anarchism is an often confusing ideology with dozens of offshoots and derivative tendencies with all sorts of ideals, proposals, and worldviews. One of the more asinine tendencies that has recently arisen among the anarchists is the idea of “idle” anarchism.
The idler anarchists decry workers as “sheeple” and insist that if only the laboring masses would cease to labor, a paradise on earth would arise in which we could all loaf about and do as we pleased, free of the burdens of capitalism and the state.
This lifestylist claptrap can be found in the works of many anarchists writers and organizations like Bob Black, Class War, and Crimethinc., but the chief modern proponent of slothful revolution is one Tom Hodgkinson, a petty bourgeois anarchist author and magazine editor living in semi-rural England who has risen to prominence on the strength of his assorted “how-to” books and articles urging us all to drop out of capitalism and live the good life.
Hodgkinson’s “ideas” are cute and fanciful constructions drawing on juvenile, foolhardy readings of Bertrand Russell, Dr. Johnson, Karl Marx, and Paul Lafargue combined with a nostalgic pastoral romanticism typical of British authors trying to sell books to Americans.
A quick survey of these works reveal Hodgkinson and his fellow “idlers” for what they really are: vapid bourgeois romantics.
Hodgkinson’s first book, How to Be Idle, is the more practical of his two main works, a 300-page tribute to life’s “idle pleasures” (smoking, fishing, tea, masturbation, etc.). His politics are less prominent in this work than in his later pieces, but still define the utopian and immature book.
The most heavily politicized chapter deals with the (dubiously idle) art of riot and revolution. Hodgkinson paints for us a picture of the idler’s ideal “revolutionary” – a sly, drunken bourgeois toting Lord Byron in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other.
The easily distracted Hodgkinson begins the chapter in praise of the occasional bomb-throwing “spectacle,” explaining that “Jesus was a rioter,”[1] and then meanders aimlessly from topic to topic, praising the Luddites, the Diggers, and a number of other English rebel groups before arriving on the subject of the Russian Revolution.
He quotes Lenin on the role of strikes in overturning tsarism, and comments that seeing “working classes loafing” is the one thing “our masters cannot stand.” [2] He then turns on the man he’s just quoted, describing Lenin as “driven and cold… a bureaucrat,” a “humourless revolutionary [leader] like… Cromwell.” [3]
Hodgkinson continues the attack, saying that the Bolsheviks merely supplanted tsarism with a despotic “new order” founded on “the intellectual authority of bourgeois thinkers such as Engels, Marx, and of course Lenin, who was firmly of the patronizing belief that the peasantry and working classes needed to be enlightened by the educated middle classes.” [3] (Italics mine)
The reasoning behind these accusations is never made clear – they are simply pulled from the black hole of anarchist thought whereby all movements and governments that refuse to abide its limp-wristed utopianism are “despotic.”
The “peasantry and working classes” make a cameo here but are otherwise not a part of Hodgkinson’s scheme, which, as the chapter ends, he reveals to be “anarchism, not socialism.” [4] The reader could probably deduce from the paltry, pathetic political proposals offered thus far what this entails, but Hodgkinson saves us the trouble by elaborating in his second book, How to Be Free (retitled The Freedom Manifesto in the States).
Hodgkinson’s bourgeois anarchist philosophy defines this sequel, but its details rest mostly in chapter twelve, which urges that we simply “forget government.” [5] This may appear at first to be an offhand remark, but it is actually Hodgkinson’s proposal for change. “We are in fact all free,” Hodgkinson says [6], but we must choose to be. And how does one make this choice? Drop out of the rat race, stop voting, don’t pay bills, don’t have a mortgage, move into a commune, don’t work a full-time job, don’t work at all, etc.
The promised land is hinted at back in Idle, where praise is lavished upon King Charles II, who was clearly a better leader than Lenin because he was “corrupt and fun-loving” rather than “pleasure-hating.” [3] Hodgkinson also holds up as an example Crass, a commune-dwelling British anarcho-punk band known for screaming incoherently and shitting in buckets.
He justifies this carnival of idiocy by pulling together small quotes and smaller ideas from assorted syndicalists, utopians, guild socialists, and other clowns while fetishizing the Middle Ages, feudalism, and underdevelopment – “purer, simpler times.”
Herein we see the inherently bourgeois character of the “idle ideology,” in that it is one practicable only by the independently wealthy. Hodgkinson is a writer and small business owner living in semi-rural England on what money he has accumulated from his books, articles, “Idler” magazine, and assorted “Idler” merchandise, a situation almost no workers find themselves in, and one that certainly no workers in tsarist Russia could sympathize with.
A review of Idle on Amazon UK summarizes it well:
Hodgkinson’s allegedly revolutionary books “perpetuate a social construct that goes back for hundreds of years – the educated bourgeois outsider who has enough confidence, talent, or background to live on his wits, and by extension, off people who work for a living… To suggest this as a realistic lifestyle choice for everyone is ignorant and misguided.” [7]
As these extracts from Hodgkinson’s work show, the lifestylist proposals propagated by the idle anarchists are ones that have no practical use for the working class of any era and that, while decrying capitalism, cannot present any realistic alternative.
Marxism-Leninism teaches us that the road to freedom is in the forceful overthrow of the capitalist order by the working masses, who will institute a new, socialist state machinery. This new proletarian order will gather and develop the means of production to be used for the collective good so that all members of society can be cared for and allowed to freely develop as human beings. It stresses industrialization, technology, and the firm and united power of the working classes as embodied in the socialist state.
This ideology has been proven time and time again as the only solution to capitalist oppression. It is these ideas which we must look to for a brighter future, because the vast majority of us cannot easily just quit our jobs and renounce urban residence for a life spent plucking on expensive guitars and sipping tea in the idyllic countryside. This is a lifestyle only available to the independently wealthy, to the darlings of the bourgeoisie, to those who can afford to drop out of the system; to people like Tom Hodgkinson.
The idle anarchist’s condescending “holier-than-thou” lifestylist proposals cannot show us the way out of capitalism, but only show the privileged a few creative ways to more fully enjoy the “idle time” their money has given them.
…
Sources
[1] How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson, pg. 175
[2] ibid., pg. 181
[3] ibid., pg. 182
[4] ibid., pg. 184
[5] The Freedom Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson, pg. 137
[6] ibid., pg. 150
[7] “and you can get it if you try” from http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2MD1S8FWOXVP6/
Further Reading (Idler Sites & Articles)
“The Abolition of Work” by Bob Black
“Taking Liberties” by Tom Hodgkinson
THE RED DIOGENES CLUB 
